Psychedelic geode-like sculptures made from molten beeswax

New York-based visual artist Laura Moriarty has an unusual use for beeswax, and it’s not for lip balm or candles. Rather, the self-taught artist dyes and melts beeswax to make brilliant geode-like sculptures. These highly pigmented beeswax artworks are so colorful and vibrant that they give off a psychedelic, Alice-in-Wonderland feel.

Moriarty’s intricate sculptures express the passage of time through layers. The beeswax is repeatedly heated and cooled to create the desired shapes and patterns, a process inspired by the formation of the earth’s crust. “Taking poetic license with geology, I compare processes of the studio with processes of the earth,” writes Moriarty in her artist’s statement. “Layers of color form the strata of a methodology in which the immediacy of the hand can translate a sense of deep time. Working and reworking molten, richly pigmented beeswax, I build each painting/object through a slow, simple yet strenuous physical engagement, which often becomes a metaphor for the ephemerality of life and civilization.”

Moriarty refers to her pigmented beeswax works as ‘Sculptural Paintings,’ all of which are richly layered and inspired by geologic processes. The Sculpture Paintings are currently on display at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art in Collegeville, PA as part of the ‘A Stratigraphic Fiction’ exhibit through March 19, 2017.